Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Margaret Wente and the New York Times again: “Plagiarism or poetic licence”?

The question has been askedbefore. Following this and this, another recent article by the Globe and Mail scribe.The passage is short, but quite similar to a NYT book review.

Wente: …But it hasn't worked out that way, Mr. West writes. Instead, what we've built is a vast cultural dependency. Americans and Canadians are fighting and dying while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.

Dexter Filkins:…This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.

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Here again is a side-by-side comparison of one bit (from a previous post), with the overlap of prose in caps. Like Wente's identification error in another un-attributed quote (recently corrected), unclear attribution can produce other problems:

Wente: One of the world's most authoritative sources of breastfeeding research is Michael Kramer, professor of pediatrics at McGill University. "The public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date," he says. The trouble is that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry, and neither side is being very scientific. "When it becomes a crusade, people are not very rational."

Rumbelow: ...one of the world's most authoritative sources of breastfeeding research: Michael Kramer, professor of paediatrics at McGill University, Montreal.

..."The public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date," Kramer says. The trouble is, he said, that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry, and "neither side is being very scientific ... when it becomes a crusade, people are not very rational."

Even if one justifies the use of another journalist’s quotes, the prose overlap substantially exceeds them.

And aside from the overall similarity, that sentence, “The trouble is that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry, and neither side is being very scientific”, raises other questions; given the migrating quotation marks in Wente’s version, the last six words change from being a recorded quote by Kramer in Rumbleow’s article, to (also) appearing as Wente’s prose in the Globe.Is that acceptable?